Why enterprise UX needs systems thinking - and new models
- Summary:
- Enterprise complexity is a huge UX obstacle. That's why UX designer Robert Reimann wants to provoke designers with new models - and systems thinking.
In Enterprise UX personas - on strategic models and design mistakes, I talked to UX designer Robert Reimann about how Enterprise UX personas fit into a strategic model. But I didn't cover why we need a range of models - not just personas - to think strategically about design.
I spoke to Reimann at Enterprise UX 2017 after his presentation, Taming Design Complexity with UX Models (see YouTube replay). This goes back to the problem Reimann hit on in our first piece. Despite the evolution of Enterprise UX, we're still passing too much complexity onto users:
So how do we eliminate that feeling of dread most users experience every time they launch the enterprise system they are required to use?
Reimann believes "systems thinking" has a lot to offer us here:
Designing for enterprise systems is a daunting challenge… What I’m provoking people to do is think of it more at the systems level.
Reimann pushes our comfort zone to consider different models:
I'm basically trying to introduce tools that could get people to think about the UX domain in a bit of a different way.
Models that bring us into enterprise reality
Rethinking UX personas is one approach, which we looked at last time. But Reimann wants to provoke us well beyond that. The models a company might choose to use will vary by organization, industry, culture, and design philosophy. But they have this in common:
They all provide ways of taking your hard won user research and making better sense of it.
The next model to look at? Organizational models. That might seem like a no-brainer, but some companies overlook it. We can lose track of common sense:
Enterprise software is designed for use by organizations, so it's good to understand organizations if you're going to be designing for them.
There are plenty of organizational models out there. Reimman used one which you can see in this blog post. This model is notable for including informal structures:
It's pretty common that enterprise systems take into account the formal structures, but less common that they take into account the informal structures.
Informal structures can include everything from values to expectations to shared objectives to collaboration techniques. What Reimann is saying here is: know your industry and business model. Visualizations matter here:
You might be able to take a fifty page white paper and visualize it... This is what models are all about, right? Is doing the kind of visualization where you can, at one glance, understand all of these relationships.
If you're looking for examples, Reimann recommends the business model canvas, originally conceived by Alexander Osterwalder and Eve Pigneur. He showed Enterprise UX attendees this canvas example from BMW:
You can see the BMW canvas and a number of others on this Pinterest page. Reimann:
The BMW business model canvas divides things up into key partners and key activities, cost structures, revenue streams, customer relationships, the value proposition, and then how all of those things relate to each other. This particular one also includes market drivers as well, which is kind of interesting.
Visualizations can spark team building. A designer could use canvas-building as a collaboration exercise with business leads, emerging with a useful result.
If you're doing in-house enterprise design, and you want to understand how your company is differentiated from your competitor, you could do two, and see the difference there. There's all sorts of ways that this tool could be used.
Reimann proposes using the Larry Grenier growth model (which debuted in the Harvard Business Review in 1972) to anticipate how an organization evolves from startup to multi-layered. In startups, everyone is involved in virtually all communication, but that changes:
You begin to get independent business groups that have more autonomy, and the upper management is more about long-range strategic planning. And it goes from there.
This gives designers plenty to think about:
Again, the provocation is, how can we design enterprise systems, with this understanding that an organization will change in these predictable ways over time... How can an enterprise system adapt to that?
The next thing designers should look at? Organizational culture models. Reimann showed us The Competing Frameworks Model, which has four different types of organizational cultures (you can see a variation here in the Competing Values Framework).
- The clan - typically smaller companies where everyone is involved, and decisions have to be made together.
- The adhocracy - prides itself on innovation, out of the box thinking, breaking rules, always looking for the new thing.
- The control culture - focused on organizational hierarchy and the right processes are being followed. Any new ideas are scrutinized to make sure they are introduced in the right way.
- The market culture - the "first mover" ethos - doing whatever you can to get to the market first.
Each culture requires a different design approach:
Some kinds of tools that are available for enterprise systems would be really wrong for some of these. For instance, in adhocracy where everything's about being fluid and breaking rules, something that required following very specific procedures to do things all the time would be like getting the wrong kind of blood in an IV. Whereas for the hierarchy, that sort of stuff would be perfect; command and control is exactly what they want and need.
For Reimann, it's about taking assumptions and intangibles and making them tangible, Then we can design to those realities.
My take
I still haven't delved into all the models Reimann presented. He also auggested:
- Data ecology models - mapping the data flow within organizations (check the field example of this in our last piece).
- Concept maps - These maps take complex domains and organize them in a way that promotes understanding, connected by relationships in a visual way. Joseph Novak invented this idea in his book, Learning How to Learn; Hugh Dubberly brought it to the UX design world.
- System models - Designers, product managers and any other stakeholders who aren't at the technical level of developers can understand the mechanics of the enterprise systems in play, and how the gears mesh together.
Reimann isn't suggesting all models should be used on all projects. But he wants to provoke UX designers - and those who are propogating a design-centered enterprise - to expand thinking.
We frequently hear that Enterprise UX has come a long way, and that the "consumerization of the enterprise" is taking hold. Reimann is pushing against that, suggesting that even those with consumer-grade design chops don't grok enterprise complexities.
Most design shows are filled with frustrated anecdotes about getting business users to embrace design. Reimann flips that on its head, urging designers to use models to grapple with enterprise reality:
Even if designers might be working in an enterprise setting, they're probably not management consultants who have seen a ton of different companies and how they work. They've seen one form of enterprise.
Reimann acknowledged these models might be outside the scope of a junior designer. Nor are all designer adept at visual models. I'd argue you're never too junior to expand your resources and your business thinking. The company you're working in today might not look the same way tomorrow. The designers who get that have a better shot.
End note – this article is part of my ongoing diginomica Enteprise UX series. You can check out a number of the speaker slide decks from the conference on the Enterprise UX 2017 web site. Reimann’s video presentation from the show is available for replay.